If this is the guy I think it is, what he lists is very biased against programs he doesn't like, including many that had a good rate of return. Some are a complete waste, but some he just doesn't like so read it remembering he's a politician pushing his agenda. However, this is a lot easier to read than the one I saw last year, thanks for the link!

Reading though it, it seems like for many of those, he is taking reasonable programs and describing them in terminology designed to portray them in the worst light.

Such as

You paid $10,000 to watch grass grow.

The US Fish and Wildlife Services is responsible for this ridiculous waste of money. This $10,000 grant paid for the monitoring the growth and thinning of saltmarsh cordgrass. The results indicate that no matter how much sod you remove from an area, it’ll grow back.

Great. Now I can sleep at night knowing the neighborhood kid who cuts my grass will have money to smoke it while attending the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s next performance.

If the Fish and Wildlife Service thinks it would be useful to know the effect of various growth control programs on the rate of growth of the cordgrass (an invasive species that is causing damage to existing eco systems), is that truly waste? I don't think so.

This list looks like mostly a list of programs and services he doesn't like or see value in, rather than being objectively wasteful.

A lot of the military budget is extremely wasteful. And I don't mean that in a "defund the military altogether" way, I mean that in a "we threw out $1.2 billion dollars' worth of ammunition last year because it expired before we could use it," "why are we pouring trillions of dollars into developing piloted fighter jets when drones are clearly the future," "you increased the cost of this common bolt by 10,000% by demanding a stupidly-tight tolerance just because it was the default tolerance in the CAD package you were using," "we're sending you $120 million worth of tanks nobody wants but you'll still have to buy your own body armor if you want the good kind" sort of way. I feel like there's a lot of room for optimization and for re-prioritization of military spending.

I have more of a problem on the fact that, I forgot where I read it, this trillion dollar fighter jet has a lot of problems with it and theres the fact that it won't be even worth it; enemies can still shoot it down as easily.

It has a few quirks here and there but the shit you're reading in the media is a fucking joke. It's a bunch of idiots who quite literally know nothing about the program, the aircraft, the Air Force, or the military talking like they're authorities on it.

The single most obnoxious issue the F-35A is having right now at least from an operational standpoint is incorrect and rather 'overzealous' PHM reports from the VMCs that frequently fail to correspond with valid AFRS data and debrief PRDs, as well as somewhat excessive nuisance failures in the ICPs, such as the SPIOs and GPIOs which can pop ICAWS and require a reset.

If you've never read any of that shit in a sentence in your life, it's because the people who complain about what doesn't work on the F-35 don't know a fucking thing about the jet and have never even been within dick's length of the damn thing.

Speaking as a soldier, using rounds closer to their expiration date is no fun. The failure rate increases dramatically - and you can imagine how terrifying it can be in combat to have your weapon fail multiple times per magazine.

The increasing failure rate is even more pronounced for mortar and artillery rounds, which are far more expensive.

We have by far the most powerful military in the world, the most effective nuclear arsenal (though not largest on paper, which belongs to russia), one of the most defensible positions of any country, and alliances with basically every notable military except Russia and China, and China is way to dependent on our economy to start a war.

Military spending (and I say this as a contractor working for the DoD). There is very little effective oversight, and billions of dollars literally have just disappeared in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We have poured billions into training and equipping the Iraqi and Afghani armies as well as "moderate" Syrian rebels, only to see them collapse in combat, and then ISIS winds up with our weapons. Eisenhower (by no means some sort of hippy pacifist) said it best: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

also defense contractor...the revolving door between government agencies that oversee contracts (especially IDIQ) and the contractors themselves needs to be managed somehow. The supply and engineering side could be leaned considerably with little or no impact whatsoever on readiness. That's hard to do when the contract manager for the government was the lead engineer or program manager for the project in it's first few phases.

TSA. Their annual budget is over $7 billion. In their 14 years of existence, they have caught ZERO terrorists and disrupted ZERO terror plots. They have succeeded in making air travel so inconvenient that some folks prefer to drive long distances.

I think most people are just going to list a program they don't like under the theory that all the money spent on it is waste. I wonder if there is a good evaluation of programs by money that is lost to fraud, abuse, poor accounting, etc.?

I think most people are just going to list a program they don't like under the theory that all the money spent on it is waste. I wonder if there is a good evaluation of programs by money that is lost to fraud, abuse, poor accounting, etc.?

People have hit on the military, so I'd like to focus on crime spending. We've wasted so much money on the War on Drugs and "tough on crime" policies, paying exorbitant amounts to keep people locked up who don't need to be.

Ugh... Like they aren't even trying to hide it at this point. People eat that shit up and you see tons of posts like Hillary for Prison 2016 Hurr durr! Honestly, have people always been this gullible or is social media making people more easily swayed?

I won't say government contracting is the most wasteful but having some experience there I think it's a shame it falls so far under the radar during discussions about cutting government spending. Politicians sometimes like to say they're "privatizing" something by contracting it out, when the same problems are still present and new ones arise (at least in my experience).

Here's one thing to think about. When the government spends money on anything it can't really be "wasted." That money doesn't get destroyed or anything. It just goes into someone else's pocket. It pay's salaries, it buys things from companies, it gets recirculated back into the economy.

When people talk about wasteful spending, they're generally just talking about the government spending money on things they don't like.

Well... that's what the ANCAPs would say and it's one way to look at things.

The opposite side of that argument is that some government spending offers a much higher ROI over the very long term than anything the market would support. Also, that some level of government spending actually improves the efficiency and profitability of the whole system. Furthermore, that some government spending enhances our quality of life in ways that the market would not sufficiently address.

For me, it's not really a discussion about waste. It's a discussion about priorities. We as a society get to adjust those long-term priorities every few years.

When a government agency is required to pay several times the market rate for office supplies simply because some Congressman slipped a bunch of pork into a budgetary bill, you are looking at pure unadulterated waste. There are a lot of places in the Federal Government where cuts can be made without negatively affecting the general welfare. If cuts aren't your thing, then the money saved through better allocation of resources can be used to increase overall payouts and benefits. However as things stand now there are few if any incentives to improve efficiency and the distribution of resources. In fact, agencies are encouraged to be as wasteful as possible within their budget because coming in under budget means less money to work with when the next federal budget is passed.

When a government agency is required to pay several times the market rate for office supplies simply because some Congressman slipped a bunch of pork into a budgetary bill, you are looking at pure unadulterated waste.

But if the CEO of the office supply company that the congressman gifted with the contract then uses the profit off of it to buy a steak dinner, is the profit for the steakhouse still waste? And if the waiter takes that chunk of their salary from the dinner and then uses it to buy Q-tips from a CVS, is the profit for CVS still waste?

Remember that the government expenditure in question is the result of collected taxes. So that money going to the CEO to pay for his steak dinner is being redistributed from tax payers. Is the subsidizing of his steak dinner the most effective use of our tax money?

No, that's when you throw money at the rich and powerful with tax cuts. Besides, my point isn't that the bloated spending is going to magically help the poor. My point is that we consider money exchanging between private hands to be the free market, and government spending to be waste/inefficiency/socialism. But how many private hands does it have to go through before the government money becomes free market?

For one, the people who work at the office supply company will get some of that government money, as will the companies that supply the raw goods for the office supply company. With trickle-down it all just goes to the rich.

I agree. Some government spending is good, particularly when it controls for market failures/negative externalities.

(I thought you were claiming that if gov't didn't tax and spend [progressively] then some money wouldn't get spent/recirculated i.e. you were arguing that scrooge mc duck needs his money taken away cause it's doing no good in his swimming pool)

That person would have spent that money in a way that maximized their personal utility

That assumes that individuals always spend in such a way that maximizes their personal utility. My father-in-law isn't paying extra every month on his cable bill for the DVR because it maximizes his personal utility (he's never used it), he's paying for it because he didn't pay attention when he called to get upgraded to HD and "uh-huh"-ed everything the guy on the phone said and he hasn't gotten it removed yet because the cable company doesn't exactly make it easy to remove it from the plan and turn in the unit and he's got other things he's got to do.

in theory private enterprise can take care of the rest more efficiently.

The theory only holds that a market will naturally come to a pareto-optimal outcome in a market where there's perfect competition.

Perfect competition requires...

An arbitrarily large number of buyers and sellers

No barrier to exit or entry of a given market as a buyer or as a seller

Perfect mobility of factors of production

Universal access to and comprehension of accurate, thorough knowledge of price, utility, and production methods

Perfectly homogenous goods

No economies of scale

No transaction costs

No externalities

That's not to say the government should step in whenever any one of those factors falls slightly short, but if a significant number of those factors fail critically—for example, a market with colossal barriers of exit to buyers, massive economies of scale, and significant externalities (positive or negative)? In a lot of cases it seems like it would be irresponsible for the government NOT to step in.

Yeah... that's why I said in theory. That said I'm pretty sure I recall a market with no transaction costs being its own thing (coase theorem?). I'm pretty sure the market can handle many things more efficiently than the government despite not having all of those qualities you listed.

There are some others in this thread that have said "It depends" and that's basically the bottom line. I mean, there are some definite necessities in controlling for market failures, but there are some definite excesses where the governments involvement (i.e. the money they spend to be involved) is counter productive.

A figure was shown on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver than every $1 spent on the IRS brings back $8 in revenue. His entire segment on the IRS was very insightful and well done, but I'm too lazy to look for the link.

How does that 8 to 1 figure prove that the IRS isn't wasteful? The IRS has the extraordinary privilege of the right to tax the world's largest economy. How would they notmake take money hand over fist? It's the entire mandate of the agency.

Other government agencies have to be a little more creative with their revenue collection strategies. The IRS just does calculations and cashes checks. And before you say how hard it is to do those calculations because the tax code is fucked to the nines, that holds no water with me. I didn't make it a convoluted mess, the government does.

Am I really supposed to be impressed by the IRS being able to say "Hey [corporation], you owe us a million dollars." for the low, low price of $125,000? Am I supposed to be convinced that such a figure proves there's no waste?

Honestly, I didn't come into this thread thinking the IRS was wasteful at all. But after hearing that even the damned IRS can't take in a measly $8 without spending $1, yeah, I think there might be some waste there.

I feel like the part where we are not seeing eye to eye is the incoming revenue. The IRS collects taxes, and does not write the code itself.

"Am I really supposed to be impressed by the IRS being able to say "Hey [corporation], you owe us a million dollars." for the low, low price of $125,00"

My interpretation of what you said here is "IRS collects 1/8 of what a company owes" The $1 to $8 statistic (which I was corrected to $1:$6) comes from funding to the department to enforcement of the tax code itself. A hypothetical situation here would be the IRS hires an agent for $100,000, and they would bring in $600,000 in taxes owed that would otherwise not be collected.

That's not practical. You're right about there not being a direct correlation between how much funding the IRS receives compared to how much is wasted, but the current 600% rate of return is more directly related the department's status of being underfunded. It's hard to waste resources that do not exist.

The most wasteful government program as far as I can tell is the completely unnecessary, dangerous, thieving DEA. It ruins way more lives than it helps. It's a jobs program for renegades and bullies. It needs to be dropped and anything positive it contributes to this country, I'm sure there must be something, I just can't put my finger on it just now, can go back to the FBI and the ATF. Eliminating this department altogether would save hundreds of billions and the effects would ripple through the entire economy. Fewer lives would be screwed up over enforcement of bad laws, fewer innocent people would be unsafe in their homes, and fewer people would be subject to illegal, unconstitutional searches and seizures. Not to mention raping the sanctity of our homes and the lost lives of beloved pets. The DEA is a considerably worse blight on our country than illegal drugs.

To answer this question, one need identify a standard of value against which to judge the efficiency of a government program. The standard I use is my own life—if the government spends my money on something I don't want it to do, that act is wasteful from my perspective. Of all government programs, the FDA inflicts the most direct damage on my life, so I would name it as the most wasteful.

But you have to compare that as a cost-benefit analysis in terms of the cost of the damages if dangerous drugs weren't being screened out. How much damage would thalidomide have done in the US if the FDA hadn't stopped its sale? That's always the problem with preventative measures, an ounce of it is worth a pound of cure but it's a lot harder to quantify.

On the converse, look at all the stuff the FDA doesn't catch. I've lost count of how many ads I've seen from lawyers trying to get more plaintiffs for some class action suit against a drug company.

It's one thing to have a longer and more expensive vetting process than any other nation. It's another to have a longer and more expensive vetting process than any other nation and still have boner pills killing people.

NEH has a budget under $150 million. You might think cowboy poetry is stupid, but from a federal budget standpoint they're a drop in a bucket of arts spending that in its totality is a drop in a bucket of the federal budget.

I didn't take the question to be about how best to save money, but rather more about what areas have waste. I think many would agree that funding a cowboy poetry festival counts as wasteful spending, irrespective of how little % wise we are spending on it.

This the most common yet a pitiful excuse for not cutting waste, and it's why nobody believes the left is serious about the discussion. "It's not a lot of money" has no relevance to whether or not the money is wastefully spent.

"Military" will be the popular answer but the reality is that welfare programs (which make up the vast majority of gov. spending) are probably extremely wasteful in terms of the benefits you actually get out of them.

All that money paid into Social Security and Medicare gets a very poor rate of return compared with what you would get if you invested the same amount of money over a similar time period. So in terms of the meta picture of money not being used for the most productive purposes, an argument can be made that welfare programs are the most wasteful by far.

These programs are not actually welfare nor are they wasteful, since they enable people with no other resources to survive and to obtain healthcare. The wasteful part is Medicare fraud. SS is a way to enforce saving for retirement. Certainly the money could be invested but perhaps it would not. Also, with investment come fees and risk.

I know when it comes to the part of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, agencies tasked with fighting it end up recouping large amounts of money that was lost. In my state (OR), we actually bring in much more money from prosecuting medicaid fraud than it costs to pursue those cases.

Indeed. And when people choose not to save, it can end up costing the government and public more in the long run. Unless we commit to a policy of "you made your bed, now lay in it", which I will never support

Lmao what? Removing all our military bases and naval ships would literally change our strength throughout the world. What would even do with the money we don't spend on the military? The industrial complex is one of the biggest parts of the US economy.

Do you realize that by defending the majority of the world with our military, that is what gives both our literal and figurative positions in the world? Sure we spend many times more, but the US military defends the West more or less on it's own, as well as most of the Pacific. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some cuts, but what you're implying is clearly ridiculous. I'm not even sure if we could defend our borders that well with 10% of the current budget.

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